Confessions of a grey-headed reporter

Daily Archives: April 18, 2008

In TV land, it seems everybody but WAGA got caught flat-footed on the Mike Evans resignation from the DOT board. Evans quit after revealing he’d developed a “personal relationship” with the board’s newest hire, commissioner Gena Abraham. Unlike other stations, WAGA actually covered the meeting with reporters Dale Russell and Paul Yates. WAGA did an excellent job of capturing the discomfort and awkwardness of the whole situation, without exploiting or sensationalizing it. WXIA and WSB were forced to use written statements from Evans– statements, which turned out to be verbatim quotes of material WAGA had on-camera.

The story is significant because Evans and Abraham came into the sights of the squirrelly House Speaker Glenn Richardson during the recently-completed session. The fact that they survived it was a political victory for them (and the Governor, who was absent yesterday). The fact that their political survival unraveled because of an apparent romance was– awkward. And worthy of the headlines it got.

“Never saw that before,” chortled the LAF spouse while watching WSB’s Thursday 6pm news. Tom Jones was covering a police chase / wreck in East Point. As such stories go, Jones had all the goods: An interview with a driver who’s car got whacked by a severed power pole; and an interview with the driver of the chased car. The driver was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car. Oddly, he was responsive to Jones’s questions. But he was unwilling to show his face, awkwardly crouching down. Jones’s photographer had only the option of shooting the driver’s ass while the suspect spoke.

Jones: You were running from police, though.

Driver’s ass: No.

Jones: How do you explain a light pole being down and people’s cars crashing?